Welcome to the Russian top-tier armor tragedy, in pictures!
The prime difficulties
Curing old mistakes
Further advancements
And if some don't believe...
When the shield is the bomb...
...and it becomes a sandwich
Let’s stop with the theater. If you want to learn how it must actually work, revisit this old but gold topic: Making Russian Tank Protection more realistic
What should we understand is Russian tanks are buffed on purpose. With their actual level of protection, the hulls of T-80s would be as paper as Leopard 2A5’s lower plate about 5cm away from the welding point (in other words, 400mm). Add up 125mm if you wish - 525 won’t do so much goodies for T-80U, you’ll get penned by DM43 at decent distance. Relict would remain a tough nut to crack though - 669mm with same armor. And T-90M would have even more, so I guess both deserve 12.0 rating.
UPD: renamed to modern armor thread, as people found it interesting to see the armor values presented on other tanks rather than just Soviet textolite randomizer.
4 Likes
So because Soviet tanks have their entirely accurate armor that means they were “buffed on purpose”?
lol
I get you want to reduce the BR of your favorite Soviet tanks, but this is not how you do it.
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if only 1.38x KE textolite was accurate!
It’s not 1.38x.
It’s ~0.45 in-game.
135mm steel
70mm Textolite.
135mm /cos 65 = 319mm.
400mm - 319mm = 80.56.
70mm /cos 65 = 165.634mm of Textolite.
80.56 /165.634 = 48.6% or 0.486.
If Textolite was 1.38 then the screenshot would say 547mm of equivalent protection, not 400.
1.38x modifier for textolite but the composite arrays on western tanks made for the sole purpose of having more protection pound for pound than plain RHA have worse modifiers than RHA
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Again, it’s ~0.45 modifier for Textolite, not 1.38.
Even then, it’s still over performing by nearly 2x
0.486x you say? 🤔
135 + (70x0.486=34) = 169mm…
Doesn't look quite close to what we have in-game!
Seems to have lower multiplier, but oh well, still 1.05x of steel…
(198-169=30, in the end we get 74mm of textolite protection)
And they had to raise it on higher tiers, of course!
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0 degree composite armor is allegedly over-performing in War Thunder as a whole. It’s not unique to Soviets.
It’s the simplistic way Gaijin models things to make them accurate where it matters.
Spoiler
50mm 1.0x Steel.
120mm composite.
50/cos 71 = 153.6
328 - 153.6 = 174.4.
120/cos 71 = 368.586
174.4 / 368.586 = .473
0.473 x 120 = 56.76 + 50 = 106.7.
Or a 5% lesser amount than the flattest angle I could find on Merkava.
Gaijin does not expect us to hit these tanks flat on, let alone with WW2 era ammo.
So the fact they overperform by 5 - 20% on 0 degrees does not matter so long as they’re accurate when angled.
It’s a compromise.
so how exactly do you prove Western NERA/composites overperforming, if 112-50 = 62 KE, out of 120mm of composites and NERA? (0.51x on average)
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You don’t, because NERA in Leopard 2 and Abrams are angled.
Though maybe Leopard 2A4’s turret side armor…
35mm HH. x1.1 = 38.5.
45mm steel.
83.5mm steel.
220 NERA.
190mm at 45.
387 - 190 = 196.
196/501 = 0.39
Flat that’s 85.8 + 83.5 = 169.3mm. Vs the 200mm shown.
Wait… I’ve seen this before.
Hehe.
0 degree protection is weird.
AFAIK the in game modifiers are for thickness tho - not for weight.
AFAIK most composites are usually much thicker than RHA, but lighter by factors greater than the increase in thickness - so pound-for-pound (ie by WEIGHT) they are much better protection.
millimeter for millimeter (ie thickness) they are not and were never supposed to be.
Let me see…
2A4 turret side steel is 1.25x (35mm LOS with 44mm KE effective). Let’s see if it’s just outer, or both steel plates.
If outer, 200-(44+45)=111. 111/220 = 0.5x KE NERA.
If both, 200-(44+56)=100. 100/220 = 0.45x KE NERA.
Le armor
Verification with turret cheek: (let’s say it’s) 89mm + (585x0.45=263) =352 . And in game we have…
...
they are indeed much lighter, but yeah, against KE the protection is much worse, considering they also use stuff like aluminum and titanium paired with ceramics. But the ceramics improves HEAT protection greatly. Only in Soviet case the composite armor seems to be better at protection from KE, than from CE!
I haven’t been following the math, but the armour modifiers are supposed to be as per this wiki page - there’s only a handful or types have modifiers >1.00 vs KE, and they are all types of steel.
So if the math for some composites is showing otherwise then it should be bug reported.
I noticed that T-72A is one of the few (I hope there are more, at least) Russian MBTs where textolite is close to it’s real life performance (0.4x KE vs 0.236x KE), giving 320-350 mm protection. Pretty close to what public sources say! Again, according to the pinned post, the steel protection higher in real life because Gaijin modelled it as 1x KE steel, while IRL it has been of 300 BHN, giving it 1.05x KE, realistically.
It feels underperforming… 118-100 = 18mm… For 105mm textolite that’s just 0.17x KE, I’d buff this fella, even though it creeps me out in my WZ-122
For the T-80B, 100 mm of textolite provides only 26 mm of KE protection.
Spoiler
